Let’s start with KYC. This is the term government regulators use to know the identify of people they’re dealing with, this is most commonly used by financial institutions and money service businesses. kycmap has a list of businesses in Canada that this applies to. When you created your bank account, you had to show your government issued id to the bank teller. This also applies to most of the online exchanges. Before you deposit fiat currency (dollars) to buy bitcoin, you need to give them your government issued id. For most exchanges, this means taking a picture of you with your passport and waiting for a human at the exchange to verify it. Note, this typically takes around 3 business days. So if you’re considering getting into bitcoin or cryptocurrency, you should start the account creation process with your exchange of choice, and beginning the KYC process.

OK. Now you want to pick an exchange and start KYC. Which exchange will you use? Here’s a great list, sorted by volume. You may also chose an exchange by location (QuadrigaCX is here in Vancouver/Canada) or trading pairs (Bittrex handles over 200 cryptocurrencies, not just Bitcoin). Once you have bitcoin, you can transfer it to any other exchange, and trade it for any of the other cryptocurrencies, but generally you need bitcoin to start. For future reference, this is a trading pair. So if I have money and I want IOTA, I likely need to find an exchange with a USD/BTC trading pair, so my US dollars can be exchanged for bitcoin. Then I would transfer my bitcoin (BTC) to an exchange with a BTC/IOTA trading pair, and do that exchange there.

If you’re reading this with the intent on getting into trading, you’ll likely have accounts on several different exchanges, so start the KYC now on several of them with many trading pairs and in different jurisdictions. I’m two weeks into going through KYC with one exchange as of writing this, for example. They weren’t happy with my utility bill scan for example, so I have to send another.

As we have economic uncertainty in several countries around the world, you have to think where the world’s elite are looking to put their money, and there’s a notable faction of them choosing digital crypto currencies, specifically Bitcoin. It’s went up around $200 USD in the last month alone since the Trump win. I bought some this afternoon, and have made 3 figures by the time I got home to write this. On top of all of this, it’s the 8th anniversary of Bitcoin today!

Bitcoin Prices Dec 2016 via CoinDesk

If you’re interested, you can find an exchange like Kraken.com and create an account. Once you have an account, go to their verification section under settings and go through as many tiers as you’re comfortable. Then you’ll need to transfer money from your bank there — at which point you can purchase/trade any of the digital crypto currencies they offer. Once you have your bitcoin, I recommend you create a wallet and remove your bitcoin from the exchange (in case the exchange is ever hacked, as many have been) and keep it on a USB stick or something more fancy like Trezor. (I just bought their multi-pack with a friend, let me know if you want the third one)

If you’ve never heard of bitcoins, they are a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. It was introduced by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.